If things were in the same state now [in 1697] as they were at the time of the Revocation, I would say without hesitation that it would have to be adhered to, but that it would be sufficient to abolish Protestant worship in public [so permitting liberty of conscience in private], and to exclude Huguenots gradually from public office, as the occasion arose, and to attempt, with patience and gentleness, to persuade them of the truth.
…But things are different today. It seems to me that if liberty of conscience were to be reestablished, even without permitting public worship…this would reflect badly on France, as if France were nervous about the current state of affairs [war with the Protestant powers].
…As for permitting the fugitive Huguenots to return to France, far from strengthening the state, some of them would only weaken it. It’s only the most determined and stubborn of them, after all, who were able to leave behind all their property, leave their homeland and renounce their most basic responsibilities and even their legitimate sovereign, rather than accepting what was required of them. People like this are ready to risk anything…They would certainly be ready to incite others here to renege on their conversions…and they would not be satisfied with liberty of conscience alone. They would want all their old rights and privileges back.
…And what of their children? If the parents had liberty of conscience, one would have to allow them to educate their children as Huguenots, and that would perpetuate a body of people whose interests, because of their religion, ran counter to those of the state. In time this could lead to civil war…We must not forget the lessons of history. Have not the Huguenots waged bloody war against our kings? Have they not several times brought in foreign armies? Even during the present reign, have we not discovered a secret plan of one of their synods to enlist the help of Cromwell?
…Moreover, the King took very strong measures against them, and for that he was both highly praised and harshly condemned…It would reflect very badly indeed on him to go back on what he has done, and it would also undermine confidence in any resolutions he may make in the future.
…For all these reasons, I think the best thing now is not to go back on what has been done, and to make no new declarations, either, but simply to treat the converted Huguenots more gently than they have been, and above all not to force them to commit sacrilege by taking the sacraments when they don’t believe in them, nor to permit this dragging through the streets of the bodies of those who’ve refused to convert on their deathbeds, and also to stop trying to claim the assets of those who are now abroad. Those who initiate armed rebellion must be punished, and rigorously, but no reprisals should be carried out on those who are not rebels themselves.
…Vigilance should be maintained against those who form assemblies or who take a public stand on their religion, but we should close our eyes to those who don’t go to mass or take the sacraments, and to how they die, and to all the other things we can choose not to see.
…The best thing would be to take their children from them [to educate them as Catholics], but that must be done with great delicacy.
…These things must all be entrusted to intelligent and devout people, who will keep the authorities properly informed of all the most important things, and proceed with the greatest care in everything else.
These are in no way the words of a fanatical anti-Huguenot. They are more measured and humane than those of all but the rarest Catholic commentators of the time. Those who were to accuse Françoise, after her death, of having instigated the Revocation and the dragonnades were never able to adduce any real evidence against her. But Liselotte’s spiteful aside would prove enough to begin a harmful, and soon unquestioned, slandering of what Françoise had always held most dear: her own reputation.
The réponse concerning the Huguenots may be enough in itself to clear Françoise of these accusations, but it is revealing of her temperament in another respect as well: its tone is quite political; her arguments are not based on, for example, the demands of Christian charity or temperance, but rather on the security of the realm and on the need for the King to maintain his international standing. They suggest that Françoise may in fact have been more politically minded, in the traditional sense, than she was generally held to be, and that her public silence to date had been largely the result of the King’s insistence that no woman at his court was to involve herself in politics. “A girl should recoil from worldly knowledge just as she does from vice,” Fénelon warned the girls at Saint-Cyr.
France lost some 200,000 of its one million Huguenots during these years before and after the Revocation. Most of them fled at first to nearby Holland, and thence to England or the Protestant states of Germany. Obliged to leave their property behind them, the majority took nothing with them but their skills, of which their new homelands swiftly reaped the benefits. Ever-libellous Holland gained thousands of printers; women in Ulster rejoiced at the inflow of linen weavers, as did London’s more elegant ladies at the arrival of the silk weavers in their new Spitalfields market. Some Huguenots had managed to smuggle a few jewels for immediate money on arrival, and from one or two refugee pockets appeared the precious, portable bulbs of Europe’s newest and rarest flower, the tulip.
“Nothing good in this world is absolutely good,” wrote a sage and gloomy Madame de Sévigné to her cousin, Bussy-Rabutin. Life at court, at least, was certainly proving less than absolutely good. No one was happy. After a year in blooming health, the King was unwell, complaining of “a little tumour near the perineum, two fingerbreaths from the anus, quite deep, not sensitive to the touch, without pain or redness or throbbing, and not preventing any of his natural functions, nor horse-riding. However, it does seem to be hardening, and growing larger.” This was the verdict of his prodding but unhelpful physicians, “and I won’t be happy until he’s out of their hands,” Françoise fumed to Madame de Brinon. “They’re killing me with worry: one day they say he’s perfectly all right, the next day he’s not doing well at all…I have no confidence at all in them.” Days of lying in bed with hot and peppery poultices pressed against the tumour had proved to no avail, and indeed had induced both “pain and redness,” and left the King walking with the greatest difficulty.
Liselotte was not happy, either, complaining to her aunt about not being “on the same footing with the King as I used to be,” and blaming “his old prune” for the exclusion. Liselotte’s grumpiness had a second cause, too. Now in her mid-thirties and more heartily built than ever, she had for the first time in her life begun to worry about her weight. “This slimming business is all well and good,” she wrote, “but I haven’t been able to manage it, since I can’t stand fish, and I’m convinced there are nobler things to do than ruining my stomach by eating too much of it…” The gloom had lifted for her only temporarily, in church, where the famously long-winded abbé Bourdaloue had suffered a memory lapse in the middle of his sermon. “Catholic sermons are too long,” she had sighed. “Bourdaloue is a famous Jesuit whose admirable sermons should render him immortal,” retorted Saint-Simon with stern Roman piety.
Nor was Athénaïs happy. Resigned at last to the King’s neglect, she had set off for the Paris convent of the Daughters of Saint-Joseph, there to seek out the celebrated dévote, Madame de Miramion, “to see if talking about nothing but God could make her forget men”—or rather, one man in particular.
The dauphine was unhappy, too. “She does everything she can to please the King, but she’s mistreated every day, by order of the old bag,” spat Liselotte. “She’s spending her life between boredom and pregnancy.”
Even the normally irrepressible Bonne was unhappy. Once “as beautiful as the day,” now “as ugly as the devil,” she had been insulted at a court ball by one of the dauphine’s ladies-in-waiting. “You’re a nice face to have at a party!” the girl had sneered. “She was right,” commented Madame de Sévigné. “At a party you need a face that won’t detract from the decorations.”
Though the balls went on, the usual livelin
ess of the court had been rather dampened by the increased favour of Bossuet and his dévots, which Liselotte managed to blame entirely on Françoise. “Honestly, you’d cry laughing to see how things are at court at the moment,” she wrote. “The King imagines he’s being pious by making everything boring and tiresome…and he thinks he’s living piously because he’s not sleeping with any young woman. His entire fear of God consists in being finickety and in having spies everywhere accusing people left and right…and in tormenting the world in general. The Old Maintenon trout takes her pleasure in turning the King against all the members of the royal family and telling them what to do…For my part, I can’t believe our Lord God can be served by nagging, fussy old women, and if that’s the way to heaven, I’m going to have trouble getting there. It’s a pitiful thing when a man can’t rely on his own reason, and lets himself be led by manipulating priests and old courtesans.”
And everyone, it seemed, had haemorrhoids—to such an extent, indeed, that Primi Visconti—“no physician and no astrologer”—nonetheless promised the King’s brother to speak to the Venetian ambassador concerning a supposed secret remedy. Françoise, a regular sufferer, had her own preferred remedy, which she conveyed to her similarly afflicted brother:
Believe me when I say I know more about it than the doctors. I didn’t get well until I stopped taking all their remedies. Eat lots: indigestion is better than constipation; but don’t eat anything salty or peppery or bitter. Stay in bed when your haemorrhoids are inflamed; travelling by coach is bad for them; only lying down will help. If the pain gets worse, bathe in warm water—the Abbé Testu has a very convenient chair where only your behind and your stomach are in the water. If you’re constipated, take cinnamon and no other medicaments; don’t have any enemas and don’t take any other remedy you may be told of. Anything fatty or oily will make it worse. Follow what I say and you’ll get well. Haemorrhoids are not to be treated lightly—that just makes them worse—but it will run its course and it won’t last forever.
Haemorrhoids or not, life at court had lately come to seem rather tiresome. Twelve years after her first arrival and three years after her marriage, Françoise was worn down and worn out by the claustrophobic, incestuous, petty, false, crowded life at Versailles—so at least it felt. She could no longer even escape to her own château of Maintenon, since the King had invaded this once peaceful refuge with his mania for building: behind the lovely private park, with trees swaying classically in the breeze and swans gliding across the lake, thirty thousand men dug and pounded and hammered and sweated to build a vast aqueduct to service Louis’s ever-thirsty fountains. Françoise had not wanted the aqueduct, did not care about the fountains, and, with Maintenon effectively a building site, now felt more trapped than ever at Versailles. Even Madame de Sévigné, hardly ever there if she could help it, had been complaining of the “insupportable martyrdom of being at court, all decked out and dressed up.”
For Françoise, with her instinctive preference for simple clothes, the “decking out and dressing up” was a genuine trial. Her gowns were never extravagant, and in her own rooms she could resort to comfortable muslin, but for court evenings she was obliged to wear the usual damask or velvet or other heavy fabrics of the day, with her gowns weighing as much as sixty pounds. An obligatory ten-foot-long train, held up by her African page, Angola, indicated to everyone her standing as dame d’atour. In this respect, at least, Liselotte’s superiority was apparent to all: as a duchess, she was entitled to a twenty-five-foot train.
If Liselotte took any comfort in this, she had none in the rest of her ordinary court attire. Beneath her sixty-pound gown, every lady wore three petticoats, and on top, a whalebone corset, which periodically snapped to stab its unsuspecting wearer. Her stockings, woollen or silk, were required to be either red, white, or blue, with a constant preference for the latter indicating intellectual pretensions on the lady’s part. Her linen, extremely expensive, often imported from Holland, could at least be kept clean by being washed in boiling water and rubbed on wood or stone, but this sturdy method of laundering wore it out very quickly. Though muslin could be washed, too, the lady’s heavier gowns were never washed at all, but simply sold after three or four wearings, to be cut up and remade into coverings for furniture.
The court lady could not even dress alone. She was helped into the various layers of her clothes by, typically, seven or eight maids, with her collar and sleeves added on at the end, and pins everywhere, a series of tiny threats making every movement hazardous. Her shoes were high-heeled, with the heels in the middle, a constant challenge to the lady’s sense of balance, since, unlike the gentlemen at court, she could not use a cane to steady herself without being viewed as elderly. One little duchess, yet to master the high heels, was preceded at all times by three of her maids, to prevent her from toppling over.
Lully was dead, leaving the unfinished score of a new lyric tragedy behind him. The King’s favourite composer, flagrant, obstreperous, wonderfully gifted, had more or less killed himself. During a performance of his own Te Deum, keeping time for the musicians with the regular thud of a heavy, pointed, six-foot staff, he had ended by piercing his own foot. The wound had turned gangrenous; the surgeons had advised amputation. But Lully was a dancer, too; though fifty-four years old, he had never stopped dancing; he could not live without both feet; he would die in possession of both of them. So he had declared to the surgeons, and so, two months later, he had done.
Lully’s Te Deum was not a new work. He had written his one great hymn of praise, ironically, almost ten years before, at the height of his debaucheries. Lully had been a homosexual of the most flaunting kind, staging the wildest orgies known to the court, creating the greatest noise throughout the night and the greatest interest in the morning. For twenty years, his gift for the operas and ballets so loved by the King had protected him from retribution, despite personal admonishments and public sermons against his “ultramontain vice.” But a few years before, the King’s illegitimate son, the comte de Vermandois, not yet fifteen years old, had been seduced into “a villainous commerce with certain young men of the court, for which he was severely chastised by order of his father.” The dauphin, too, had begun frequenting a group of flagrantly homosexual courtiers, with a certain outsized diamond ring being passed from one to the other as their affairs developed. “These vices are more Florentine than French,” noted Primi Visconti, and indeed, given his customary outrageous indiscretion, it was the Florentine Lully who was held responsible. Though his wife had accepted the situation placidly, his mother-in-law had not. The King was petitioned, Père Bourdaloue preached a direful sermon, the police swooped on Lully’s house, his beautiful page-boy was carted off to confinement in a monastery, and the composer himself became suddenly persona non grata.
Liselotte, no lover of the “bits of old Lully operas” so frequently played at the King’s appartements, and whose husband, Monsieur, was himself homosexual, found it all deplorable, too, and blamed it on the court’s too-pious Catholicism. “You wouldn’t believe how blatant and wicked all these French people are, as soon as they turn twelve or thirteen…Their piety prevents the men from speaking openly with the women…and then once they’re interested in boys, they don’t care about pleasing anyone else, and the more dissolute and blatant and wicked they are, the more they like them…They say it was only a vice when there weren’t very many people in the world, and so the sin lay in stopping the population from growing, but now that the world is fully populated, they say it’s just a harmless pleasure…Among people of quality, it’s perfectly acceptable to say that God hasn’t punished anyone for these things since Sodom and Gomorrah…Where in the world can a man be found who simply loves his wife, and doesn’t keep mistresses or boys on the side?” she added plaintively. The answer was in fact not far to seek, but thinking of Louis and Françoise did not make Liselotte any happier. “And as for that old whore,” she concluded, “I wish her in hell, and may the Father, Son, and Holy Ghos
t lead her there!”
The “old whore” herself had felt obliged to raise the issue of the “ultramontains” with the King several years before, at the persistent urging of the curé of Versailles. Louis had conceded the scale of the problem, but, in consideration of his brother, had preferred to turn a blind eye. Françoise had evidently borne no ill will towards the “ultramontains.” Indeed, in October 1685, after one of many altercations between composer and King, she had called Lully to her own rooms and suggested the means by which he could reestablish himself in Louis’s good graces. “The King is just as angry with you as he was,” she told him, apparently adding a few reproaches of her own, “but your own gifts can redeem you.” Lully’s oeuvre de réconciliation, on a theme suggested by Françoise herself, was The Temple of Peace, a full court ballet, completed in just one week.
But in the end, his continuing excesses had become impossible for the King to countenance. In the spring of 1686, Louis had indicated his final displeasure by failing to appear in the dauphine’s apartments for a performance of Lully’s newest and most accomplished opera, Armide. He had feigned illness, but the slight had been unmistakeable. Lully had responded with an anguished letter: “The praises of all Paris will not suffice. It is only to you, Sire, that I consecrate the fruits of my genius. Even this dangerous malady, which came upon me so suddenly, did not prevent me from completing this opera. It was to fulfill your own command, Sire, that I continued working…”
The Secret Wife of Louis XIV: Françoise d'Aubigné, Madame de Maintenon Page 37
